SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS (2001) Flawed in premise, but the execution is perfect Series 7: The Contenders is a satire of reality TV - which hadn't even really much shown itself yet on American TV yet - that hits most of the right notes and was obviously made by people with a terrific grasp of the subject matter. But it has its problems, and two in particular are what ultimately sink it; first, the satirical hook (a reality show where contestants kill each other) is too flawed and too far a stretch to swallow as springing even from the tackiest 15-minutes-of-fame program. I could buy it in The Running Man - after all, it had exploding neck collars too. Here, everything else looks like...everything else. I don't see how people eating pig testicles on TV brings us any closer to shows where people kill each other for fun and prizes. And two, the rules of the game are very unclear. It's presented as a big long episode of TV, complete with teasers and tags to bookend commercial breaks. No actual commercial breaks though - I'm not sure if adding maybe one Robocop-style commercial per break might have helped flesh out the presumably more screwed-up world in which this is set, but they probably would have slowed down the already overlong movie. The show centers on six "contenders", one of which is the "reigning champion", the other five randomly selected and basically drafted out of their homes. The champ is Dawn (Brooke Smith), an eight-month-pregnant woman who we see has killed five or so people before this particular selection of contenders, and has learned a few advantages like how to psych them out (with phone calls). The new five include a teenaged girl, a crazy old man, a nurse who leaves little doubt that there'll be a "mercy killing" on the show at some point, a 39-year-old burned-out loser whose family probably isn't going to miss him, and a sickly-looking guy who tries blowing his brains out as soon as the producers of the show give him his pistol. We don't get to know much about the crazy old man, but we learn a bit about the rest and how the people close to them involve themselves (or not) in their do-or-die quest for fame, and...what? We hear three vague references about how Dawn is trying to win her freedom, but the question of "freedom from what?" only gets stumpier when we see that she's done this show before. Freedom to just go up against the next five contenders? Kill 'til death, with no reward? Nobody else has any apparent motive aside from avoiding getting killed; nobody even considers telling the producers of the show to take a hike. We already know they have everything to lose; what do they have to gain? The look and feel of most of the movie is perfect. Terrible, tacky doomy music and terrible, tacky sentimental piano cack are played all at the right times, complete with the fitting montages of supposedly disturbing or heart-tugging shots. The narrator (Will Arnett) milks the precise trash-TV tone used by those you hear offering snarky commentary on fatal car chases. Similarly though, anyone who's seen enough of these shows to start to understand how much reality these shows aren't will start wondering things...if everybody has a camera following them, where's his/her camera now? There's a "dramatization" of the making of a deadly milkshake; how did they convince her to participate in re-living this traumatic moment, and considering what happened by the end of the movie, when did she find the time? So it works in small doses - as a 90-minute movie, it gets old well before it's over. There are a few moments which try shaking up the format a bit - like the above-mentioned "dramatization", or later, a "re-enactment" of the climactic scene, which crops up for suspiciously unlikely reasons (one remembers a rare sentence from the crazy old man earlier). It's a bit of fresh air, but by this point I was a little beyond caring who lived and who died; I just wanted their actions to surprise me a little, and what happens in the re-enactment does not surprise. If we're asked to believe that something different "actually" happened, I would rather have seen that. The timing of Series 7: The Contenders is the most remarkable thing about it; had it been made a year or two later, with a little more time for the notion of "reality TV" to sink into pop culture, it might've become a Survivor-sized - well, at least Fear Factor-sized - phenomenon unto itself (it was apparently originally conceived as a TV series). It probably would've worked better in smaller instalments, though its one-joke nature couldn't have carried it for very long. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE